ABSTRACT
In my Introduction, I suggested that some poetry could make a unique contribution towards exposing possible sixteenth-century conceptual configurations of relationships between the cosmic, the human, and the divine. I observed, firstly, that many poetic discourses differed from most other sixteenth-century ones in their imagistic styles, that is, in the extent to which — and the ways in which — they used images. Secondly, I argued that these genre-specific modes of representation might be particularly revealing where relationships between the human, the divine, and the cosmic are concerned: since the cosmic and the human could be considered to image ontologically both the divine and each other, the use of the cosmic and human to image linguistically the divine and each other could provide a powerful way of ‘thinking’ about the ontological images which the linguistic ones reflect. In other words, linguistic images might explore the nature, extent, and implications of similarities between the human, the cosmic, and the divine.
